Then there are the players who are devoted to seeing just how much fun they can wring out of the landscape. Base-jumping groups have formed, where players find the highest spots in Azeroth and leap out into space, trying to land on tiny targets far below. Others engage in less noble pursuits, known as griefing, which involve everything from camping (lurking around a player you’ve just killed, waiting for them to revive, and then killing them again) to boss training (provoking a high-level monster to follow you back to a city, where it promptly decimates dozens of low-level characters). It’s a tiny copy of the real world and, like the real world, it’s unpredictable. The WoW design team operates under the maxim, “No matter how smart you think you are, it doesn’t mean anything until 1 million players try it.”
Blizzard had 250 employees when the game launched. These days it has 1000. Their North American servers require over 300 full-time game masters to ride herd, figuring out who’s a bot (a character avatar controlled by a software program that plays the game automatically), dealing with griefers, and keeping the public chat as inoffensive as possible. When a new patch with fresh content is downloaded to the game, the design team spends patch day in a “war room,” toggling from server to server and hotfixing bugs and exploits as soon as players discover them. Despite all this, there are still surprises, like the Corrupted Blood plague.